IL Day 2- Intuitive Art, Incredible Heights, and The Internet
My second full day in Chicago started with a trip to Groundswell Coffee, in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. They had a really cozy convivial atmosphere with great art on the walls and even better coffee.
Fueled up, I made my way to my first stop of the day the Intuit Art Center, a museum dedicated to self-taught artists or “outsider” art. The museum’s mission is to highlight works by artists who don’t fit neatly into traditional frameworks of what being an artist usually looked like in “Fine Art” settings, often due to them belonging to minority groups, suffering from mental illness, or not having the means to use more standard materials or practices. I’ve enjoyed outsider/ folk art exhibits I’ve seen throughout the country, and there’s something sort of magical about seeing really unbridled creativity. However, there can often be oddly condescending undertones in how such exhibits are presented or a sort of glorification of the artist’s hardship so it was nice to see a museum who’s goal is meant to be a more thoughtful ongoing conversation between the artists, curators, and viewers.
The centerpiece of the museum’s collection is a faithful recreation of the one bedroom apartment and studio of Chicago’s most famous outsider artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger lived and worked in a space like this in Lincoln Park for 40 years. He led a reclusive life and not much is known about him other than he was institutionalized during his childhood in the horribly named Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, he served in WWI, and he spent his days working as a hospital janitor and devoutly going to Catholic Mass. When he wasn’t at work or church, he collected hundreds of random objects he found on the street and worked tirelessly on a giant 15,000 page illustrated novel called In the Realms of the Unreal. He taught himself how to draw by tracing images he liked from various advertisements, newspapers, and coloring books, and his art often featured vibrant densely-arranged collages of found images and his own watercolors. The sheer amount of art that he generated in such a small space would be staggering in its own right, but perhaps most interestingly of all he never told anybody he was doing it! After he died, his landlords stumbled upon the 15 bound copies of his novel and hundreds of his massive sprawling illustrations, which must have been a simply incredible surprise. They brought their find to a relative who was a successful photographer and he championed the artistic value of the work. Darger’s work gained international exposure and acclaim, and while it will probably always be a little too strange for true mainstream recognition, the work and his unconventional story has continued to inspire other artists and oddballs. The museum bought the contents of Darger’s apartment in 2000 and worked to assemble a faithful (albeit slightly tidier) facsimile in their galleries of his cramped, chaotic living space, and it’s certainly something to behold.
Along with the recreation of the apartment, the museum had a number of impressive works by Darger that alternate between gorgeous pop-art and horrific nightmare imagery as he tells the story of The Vivian Girls, 7 young princesses who lead an uprising of child slaves to overthrow the evil Glandelinians. Darger’s novel is Tolkien-esque epic featuring fantastical creatures and a seismic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, but the fact that his protagonists are all young children makes some of the illustrations of grislier war scenes a little harder to stomach.
After the Darger collection, I perused the main gallery space which featured a special exhibition entitled Chicago Calling: Art Against the Flow highlighting various renowned outsider artists from the Chicago area. I was instantly struck by these dramatic emotionally charged sculptures by Dr. Charles Smith. Smith served as a marine in the Vietnam War, and, upon returning to find a pervasively racist home waiting for him, he began channeling his anger and trauma into art. He transformed his home in the suburb of Aurora, IL into what became dubbed the African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veteran’s Archive. His home-made museum became the site of hundreds of sculptures, signs, and paintings documenting various aspects of the African-American Experience with a particular focus on historical atrocities (especially his personal proximity to the disproportionate number of Black military casualties in Vietnam). While Smith’s art is certainly heavy, he does focus on expressions of joy and healing through art and education, and there’s always beauty mixed in with the pain.
Along the gallery walls were paintings and drawings from Chicago artists Lee Godie, Drossos Skyllas, Aldo Piacenza, Pauline Simon, Joseph Yoakum, and William Dawson. Highlights for me included: a portrait of a woman with roses by Lee Godie, an artist who lived on the streets and sold her works enterprisingly on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago, which combines her love of French Impressionism with a dash of Yellow Submarine; the hauntingly beautiful Eye of God by Drossos Skyllas, a completely self-taught artist who was nonetheless highly technically refined; a vibrantly loopy landscape by Pauline Simon, a woman who only began painting in her 70s; and evocative paintings and carvings by William Dawson, who also began making art after retiring and who also happened to be the one of the very first Black member of the Teamsters Union.
Next up were some deeply lovable sculptures made by artist Gregory Warmack better known by the moniker Mr Imagination. Mr. Imagination used commonplace objects like bottle caps and scraps of fabric to make elaborate assemblages and sculptures that celebrate the joy of everyday life.
The next bit of gallery space was dedicated to paying homage to the Maxwell Street Market, a beloved but unruly sprawl of flea market stalls, artists, musicians, thrifters, and lovers of things quirky and homemade. The market became a hub for outsider artists, and while it still exists to an extent, it is fondly remembered as a symbol of a more punk-rock, DIY 20th century Chicago.
To try to replicate some of the chaos of the market, the museum curated the gallery salon style with rows of shelves bursting with works by legitimate artists shoulder to shoulder with knick-knacks, antiques, and hand me downs. Highlights for me included: model ships by an artist namedJames “Grandpa Moses” Urbaszewski; ceramic jars shaped like faces; little characters made out of bottle caps; various old action figures and carved wooden figurines; and carvings, paintings and devil figures by the artist Bruno Sowa.
Naturally my favorite thing on the shelves had to be these knit Berts from Sesame Street:
Across from the shelves were various hanging artworks. My favorites included: a raucous bar scene by Nicholas Greely; a portrait of a woman dramatically posing on a street corner also by Nicholas Greely; a very classical portrait of a woman holding roses by Sylvia Roberti; a cute christmas scene Frances Caldwell hanging above a sprawled out drunk by Nicholas Greely; a color pencil self-portait by Lee Godie featuring the phrase “Chicago We Own It”; and a lovably Pop-Art collage by Joe “40,000” Murphy.
Lastly, there were some incredible pen and ink drawings (largely done from memory) by the artist Wesley Willis. I knew of Wesley Willis before for his boisterous, irreverent punk music that largely consisted of him yelling absurd rants over cheesy Casio keyboard loops. Willis suffered from schizophrenia throughout his short life, so his lyrics often had a logic wholly there own but there was something very magnetic about his unbridled originality.
After the Outsider Art, I got bit more touristy and went to Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, the city’s Metropolitan Center and home to a hefty percentage of their most famous buildings. The hardest to miss would have to be the former second-tallest-building-in-the-world, the 100 story tall John Hancock Center, which strikes a fairly imposing figure.
For lunch, I went to the Food Ease Market a (sadly now defunct) elevated food court in Water Tower Place, another giant skyscraper in the neighborhood that houses a multi-story shopping mall. . I sampled a little bit of everything and got some crab cakes, a cheesy baked tomato, pierogies, polish sausage, Mac and cheese, and a veggie casserole (because any good midwest meal must have some form of casserole). Everything was delicious but in a city as Polish as Chicago, the pierogies and sausage stood out as being particularly impressive.
After lunch, I made my way to the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) to meet Diantha (the friend I was staying with). On Tuesdays, Chicago residents get in for free so we decided to take full advantage. I could tell right from the sign out front I was gonna like it there.
The museum blew us away right out the gates, with an incredible solo exhibition of the works of Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga, her first in the US. The exhibition, entitled To Dig A Hole That Collapses Again, showcases Nkanga’s work in a variety of mediums, exploring themes of colonialism, environmentalism, materiality, and the body. Her tableaus are frequently dreamlike and beautiful, featuring figures whose bodies begin to blend with the landscapes drawing parallels to colonial treatment of both people and natural resources.
The exhibition began with a number of paintings, prints, collages, and tapestries that served as an impressive introduction to the artist’s unique visual language and her command of several different techniques. The tapestries in particular were astounding with their complex blend of textures and imagery.
Highlights for me included these two sweetly bizarre pieces of romantic embraces between people and landscapes: a tapestry called In Pursuit of Bling: The Transformation exploring the environmental cost of mining diamonds to provide romantic gestures; and a drawing called The Embrace, that feels like an African update to the works of European surrealists like Magritte and Ernst.
Among the more two-dimensional pieces, the gallery featured some impressive sculptural and installation-based pieces. These included: Solid Maneuvers, a topographical sculpture made of hand-cut slabs that evokes mining and geography to comment on the use of man-made tools to carve landscapes; Anamnesis, a site specific piece in which the artist cut a river like structure into a white wall and filled it up spices most commonly imported to Chicago, including cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, pepper, and vanilla; an ongoing project entitled Carved to Flow featuring stacks of hand-made soap by the artist made sustainably out of materials from the Mediterranean and Africa that visitors can also purchase to help fund the projects continuation; and a sculpture called the Limits of Mapping that captures the political violence often underlying mapmaking and the drawing of borders.
Next up was a tapestry entitled In a Place Yet Unknown, that creates a sort of linguistic map out of the process of writing and editing a poem with the completed poem in the bottom left corner. The poem itself is really lovely showcasing Nkanga’s gifts as a writer as well as a visual artist, but the playfulness of drawing one’s attention to the normally unseen acts that go into creating the work really won me over.
Another piece I found really striking for it’s bold use of negative space was a painting called What Is Mine Is Not Yours, which feels pretty dynamic thanks to Nkanga’s sharp lines and dense environmental compositions even though most of the canvas is pure white.
The next series of works were a fantastic exercise in looks being deceiving. These included a piece entitled Steel to Rust which looks looks like it has to be a geologic photograph but is really an impossibly intricate woven tapestry; and a series of what the artist calls Alterscapes which look like rich paintings but are in fact elaborately composted photographs of built sets and the artist herself dressed in all-black interacting with the faux-landscapes.
At this point, we had made it far enough into the gallery to have circled around the large tapestry I had already really liked (In Search of Bling) to discover that the reverse side was totally different and equally stunning.
Lastly there were some more of the artist’s works on paper. This series seemed to have almost stream-of-conscious logic to them making abstract visual connections between social interactions, memories, domesticity, and industrialization.
My favorite piece for the way it just sort of dissolves before your eyes was called Working Man and featured a woman embracing a half-formed man while the landscape outside gently flows into into abstract composition of the same colors.
Next up was a playful photography exhibit entitled Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography. The exhibit serves as a showcase of the titular artist, Kenneth Josephson, and an interrogation of the supposed reality of photography. Josephson is considered one of the earliest examples of a conceptual photographer, making the conscious artifice of the image a central part of his artwork. While he had classical fine art training, Josephson also had a winking sense of humor and prankster’s spirit so even though his photos are gorgeously composed there’s almost always something amiss, some bit of subtle or not-so subtle staging or optical illusion. Highlights for me included: Stockholm, 1967 in which carefully placed snow makes a Volvo appear to have a white shadow; New York, 1970 in which the artist holds a photo of a boat over the horizon to make it look like it’s sailing in the distance; a photo of a brick wall with a poster of a bricks plastered over in a way that would be perfectly seamless if the artist didn’t helpfully roll up one corner; Chicago, 1964 in which the artist recursively photographs a tree by placing a polaroid of the tree on the tree and then taking another photo so theres photos within photos within photos; Chicago, 1980 in which carefully placed tree branches almost make you think a hanging backdrop is actually part of the same landscape as the real woods; and Indiana, 1972 which might just actually be a beautiful photo without any trickery (but I’m genuinely not sure).
One of my favorite pieces was an artbook Josephson made called Matthew, which consisted entirely of adorably quirky photos of his son, Matthew.
To complement the Josephson pieces, the museum featured a collection of works by other contemporary photographers that were either directly or indirectly inspired by him and his playfulness with the form. High;ights for me included: a collage of seemingly random imagery linked by colored lines of motion by the artist John Baldessari; a photograph of a bird perched on a clear plastic rod by Marlo Pascual; a photograph by Xaviera Simmons of a woman with a skirt made of various photos, textiles, and drawings; another photo by Xaviera Simmons echoing Josephson’s photo of a photo of a boat on the the water; a pop-arty assemblage called Three Eyes (with Gold Bug) by John Baldessari; a precariously arranged still life by Leslie Hewitt; a trippy collage by David Hockney called Gregory Loading His Camera; a funny photo by Josephson of the artist measuring mountains with a ruler; a Norman Rockwell-esque recreation of a 1930s camera shop by Rodney Graham; a photograph of teeny rocks that looks almost intergalactic called Figurative Concretion by Jessica Labatte; a humorous collage by Buzz Spector called Waterfalls that features dozens of pictures of waterfalls that appear to all be streaming from three photos of peeing statues; a self-portrait by Melanie Schiff featuring the artist blending into the album art of Neil Young’s self-titled album; a collage of photos from the same view of Chicago’s skyline by Josephson; and a simultaneously captivating and kind of creepy series of photos within photos by B. Ingrid Olson.
Leaving the photography exhibit, we were greeted by some cryptic neon in the form of Joseph Kosuth’s No Number 6, which actually felt very on brand with the theme of the last exhibit.
Walking to the next galleries, we were dazzled by an installation in one of the museum’s common spaces designed by Mexico City architectural firm Pedro y Juana. The piece, entitled From the Tropics with Love, featured over 200 glowing planters and lamps to create a dreamlike indoor hanging garden.
Next up we stepped out onto an outdoor courtyard being watched over by these goofy goopy sculptures by Thomas Schütte called Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL).
Back inside, the next gallery was dedicated to the works of two iconoclastic scultors, Alexander Calder and Jeff Koons. Personally I preferred Calder of the two because his minimalist kinetic sculptures just had a simple elegance and charm to them.
One Jeff Koons piece I did really like for its sort of surreal pop artiness was entitled Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank and featured three basketballs gently bobbing in perfect suspension in a tank of water and salt. I think a lot of Koons’ work is a little hollow (or maybe I’m just biased against him because he seems like an impressive asshole in anything I’ve ever read about him), but he does have a knack for creating striking imagery even if there isn’t much below the surface.
Next up was a really fun showcase for a local Chicago artist named Mika Horibuchi, who specializes in works that involve optical illusion. The installation had the appearance of a living room or lobby and allowed the artist to work in a variety of mediums to fool your eyes. Highlights for me included: an oil painting of a watercolor the artist’s grandmother made and sent her a photograph of from Japan that you would never guess isn’t an actual watercolor; some incredibly realistic paintings of curtains playfully entitled Curtains Drawn; a folding screen rug that reveals a tiger when you look at it head on; a table with a design referencing the classic two-faces-in-the-outline-of-a-vase optical illusion; an even more shockingly realistic painting of a curtain; and an actual curtain just to make you even less sure what’s real and what’s not. It was a really great exhibit, and the artist is only just barely 30 so hopefully she’ll have more showcases to come.
At this point, Diantha and I were starting to fade a bit so we went to the museum coffee shop for a pick-me-up. On the way down, we encountered a spectacular piece in the stairwell entitled Water Falls from My Breast to the Sky by Ernesto Neto. The piece consists of an intricate woven sculpture resembling a waterfall that spans multiple floors and has an impressive sense of motion despite just being hanging fabric.
After refueling with some coffee, the next exhibit we saw was a tribute to 1960s LA entitled Endless Summer. The exhibit featured works by a variety of high-profile artists and the works were linked by a relaxed minimalist aesthetic and a focus on commercial materials like plastics and fiberglass. This gave each piece a sort of ethereal, futuristic quality and the way the sculptures play with light reflects their origin in sunny California. Highlights for me included: the ghostly Le Mur S’en Va by Craig Kauffman; a cube by Larry Bell that plays with the way different see-through materials actually change light; a pop-y lacquered plastic sculpture by Craig Kauffman that sort of looks like an abstract hot rod; a dynamic sculpture by Alexander Peter made out of polyester resin that has a swooping motion and color gradient that almost makes it look like its fading away; and some geometric abstractions by Judy Chicago that were a product of her experimenting with spray paint and plastics.
Lastly there was a strangely captivating series of prints by Ed Ruscha that cheekily sought to define English Identity with efficient minimalism through six rhyming words: News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, & Dues. All the prints were dyed through organic processes and while the color gradients are subtle they are striking in their own weird way.
Last up was the largest exhibit at the MCA, entitled I Was Raised on the Internet, which comprised of a chaotic and kaleidoscopic survey of 100+ works art grappling with life in the digital age.
The exhibit was broken up into sections to more easily group artworks exploring similar corners of cyberspace. The first section, Look at Me, featured artists examining how different facets of identity are expressed on the internet. This was kicked off by Evan Roth’s Internet Cache Self-Portrait, a sprawling collage of photos capturing every site the artist visited on a given day capturing the ways in which the internet can be both detached and deeply personal at once. It also serves as an excellent visual representation of the feeling of falling down a virtual wormhole.
Up next were two pieces by Juliana Huxtable which combined essays and poems about the artist’s experiences being a queer woman of color in the internet age with mesmerizing digitally-rendered backdrops giving the text some ethereal visuals.
Next were some contemporary twists on traditional portraiture. Highlights for me included: Joel Holmberg’s humorously surreal painting Protean, that features a gargantuan squatting businessman rendered as if such an unusual image would be a home page template for a website; and photographs by Amalia Ulman (center and right) from a series entitled Excellence and Perfection, in which each carefully crafted and occasionally digitally altered photo was posted on her actual Instagram and Facebook accounts under the guise of documenting a real makeover and lifestyle upgrade that was actually entirely fictitious, an act of exploring the ways we craft identities online, how people fall for these fantasies, and how often women are harassed online because as soon as she started to seem like a “hot girl influencer” she became the recipient of much vitriol. It’s interesting to think that when you just see the photos in an art museum you think of them for their aesthetic qualities but when someone posts them as if if they were real social media they’re seen as real insight into the artist’s life and judged based on entirely criteria.
One of the most striking pieces was entitled Blackness for Sale by the artist duo Mendi + Keith Obadike, and featured a screenshot of a real ebay sale the artists started auctioning off Keith’s Blackness. The pointed description satirically listed off what the artists’ felt were the pros and cons of being Black (or owning Blackness). The sale was up for four days before the site took it down for being “inappropriate”. The artists were quick to point that lawn jockeys and other items featuring racist caricatures were still actively being sold on the site. But of course an art piece actually exploring racial identity is inappropriate.
Next up was an installation focused on the way the internet can bring people together entitled Eternal Internal Brotherhood / Sisterhood by Angelo Plessas. The piece resembled a hybrid between a shamanistic tent and a dorm room common area, and encouraged guests to socialize with one another while around them videos from retreats the artist hosted around the world were projected onto the walls.
Next up were two pieces of computer animation looking at parental relationships. On the left was Jacolby Satterwhite’s En Plein Air Music of Objective Romance, Track #1 Healing in My House which featured an elaborate collage of animation and video choreographed to a charmingly intimate homemade recording of the artist’s mother singing. On the right was Bogosi Sekhukhuni’s Consciousness Engine 2: absentblackfatherbot featured an intentionally stilted and awkward animated avatar reading facebook messenger exchanged between the artist and his father, whom he never met until he was 18 and who ultimately blocked him when he decided he was done interacting with him.
Runding out the first chunk of the exhibit was one of the wildest video pieces: Rachel Maclea’s It’s What’s Inside That Counts, a 30 minute fever dream of animation and dazzlingly grotesque make-up effects used to tell the dystopian story of a future race of emoji-esque humanoids enslaved by their addiction to their devices.
The next section was entitled Touch Me and looked at the ways in which art can and can’t translate the nebulous virtual world into the physical realm. It was an interesting thought experiment about what constitutes “realness” and a cool showcase for the ways in which artists have embraced the possibilities of new technologies.
Highlights for me included: Harm van den Dorpel’s Assemblage (‘About’ press and reviews) which consisted of a swirling orb news articles and press reviews from the artist’s website printed on handcut synthetic glass and arranged to evoke a literal flow of information; a piece entitled Glowing Edges_7. 10 by Dutch atist Constant Dullaart (incredible name) in which he carefully recreated a high-resolution photo of the first ever photograph to manipulated in photoshop (a candid of the software creator’s wife on a beach) and then created a series of pop-art prints of different manipulations of the photo like a digital-age version of Warhol’s screenprints; a sculpture by Oliver Laric called Sleeping Boy in which the artist used a 3D printer to recreate an 1834 sculpture called Sleeping Shepherd Boy looking at the ways in which technology fails and succeeds at replicating the human hand in interesting ways; an altered digital print from John Rafman’s Interiors series in which the artist textures impressionist paintings onto different backdrops; a series of haunting faux-African masks by Matthew Angelo Harrison made using a home-made 3D printer; and a photo by Josh Tonsfeldt called Adrenaline Tattoo which looks manipulated but really has it’s hazy quality because it was taken through the window of a store that happened to be called Adrenaline because the artist thought it was poignant and funny that he caught a glimpse of someone checking their phone while someone is writing with a needle on their chest.
One of the more impressive sculptures was a piece by Aleksandra Domanović called Votive: Pomegranate, which used a combination of traditional culpting and casting techniques and innovative 3D printing to create a piece that looks at the intersection of high art and commercial manufacturing with a funny aesthetic that looks almost like an ancient Greek sculpture being packaged to be shipped by Amazon.
One of the more mind-bending pieces was an untitled sculpture by Josh Tonsfeldt which really played with viewers’ perceptions by using reflective surfaces and LCD video screens. At first it almost looks like two flat surfaces, but you quickly realize that one corner is pulled up and hidden beneath it is a small assemblage totally different than the assemblage placed in the center. If you at the sculpture from behind, an abstract animation of a swirling black mass plays across the screen and seems to either reveal or obscure one or both of the assemblages calling to mind the difficulty of knowing for sure how much you can trust what you see on a screen.
Next up was an impressively intense video installation by Hito Steyerl called Factory of the Sun which featured a surreal animation that was like a blend of dystopian science fiction and dancing video games and placed. the screen at a sharp angle in a built environment resembling the grid-like world of the movie Tron.
Next up were some variations on traditional painting using digital techniques. Highlights for me included: a mad swirl of floral ad abstract imagery by Petra Cortright that uses painting tools from photoshop and DeviantArt to create something of a blur between the impressionists and the abstract expressionists; a quietly lovely digital collage of a home studio that is uncannily photo-realistic in places and subtly off in others to create a sort of mesmerizing effect (sadly I didn’t record who the artist was and this was one piece I couldn’t trace back while I was writing this); and two paintings by Constant Dullaart that used neural networks to synthesize various photos of landscapes (in this case oceans and trash piles) and then generate composite image a which the artist faithfully recreated by hand capturing all the weird,and sort of haunting imperfections of the mindless computer image.
Next up was an interactive installation by Jon Rafman called Transdimensional Serpent which combined a neat physical sculpture with a trippy virtual reality experience. The titular serpent, made out fiberglass and faux-leather, serves as a bench where visitors can sit and put on VR headset and be swept away on an animated journey through mythical environs. I didn’t actually put on the headset because there was a long line and they can make me dizzy, so I didn’t get the full experience but I thought the concept and the physical sculpture were cool enough to stand on their own.
After the installation, the next gallery had more riffs on traditional painting and photography. Highlights for me here included: Erin Hayden’s “Reading”, a tryptic combining abstract painting, collaged photos, and digital iconography to create a sort of snapshot of being adrift in the world wide web; a wild painting by Petra Cortright of a chaotic digital landscape given the hilariously inaccessible filename-esque title fox999arizona@morning-pro(version_final_Hirva).execute; and two surreal still-lifes by Takeshi Murata exploring the way digital photography can make even nonsensical imagery look glamourous.
In one corner of the gallery was a sculpture by Antoine Catala of a little emoticon face hooked up to a rotating rod so that it’s frown was constantly being turned upside down and back again.
Next up were some pieces inspired by the phenomenon of viral videos. My favorites here Eva and Franco Mattes’ My Generation which showed a compilation of videos of people breaking things when they lose at videos games displayed on a seemingly smashed computer on the ground and Cory Arcangel’s playful Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 which features the titular classical piece by Arnold Shoenberg played entirely by cats via very carefully edited YouTube videos which is both incredibly impressive and deeply stupid. My favorite kind of art. (You can hear it here)
The next video piece was tucked inside a small gallery space, and when I stepped inside I was surprised and delighted by quite possibly my favorite piece in the entire exhibition: Jon Raffman’s Kool-Aid Man in Second Life. Between 2008 and 2011, Raffman offered guided tours of the virtual worlds within the online multiplayer game Second Life using an avatar modeled after the Kool-Aid Man, complete with a hauntingly unchanging smile. The game’s landscapes are almost entirely user-generated, and limited only by the players’ imaginations. The internet being the internet, when people had free reign to create whatever they wanted the results ranged from simple recreations of real places to brilliant artistic forays into elaborate fantasy-scapes to very sexually explicit romps into fetishes and subcultures, and Kool-Aid Man was there observing it all. It was such a patently silly concept but somehow the goofiness added a sort of sweetness to the proceedings that helped make the more shocking footage more palatable; the Kool-Aid Man couldn’t help but appear non-judgmental and it was sort of poignant to just get this weird insight into the way people have used the internet to make connections, realize fantasies, and explore their artistry and there’s something kind of beautiful about that even when those fantasies and artistic impulses are batshit insane.
Next up were a series of pieces exploring internet-based approaches to Pop-Art. These included: Douglas Coupland’s Arial Luggage Sunset which creates a Roy Lichtenstein-esque sunset but instead of using painted comic book dots the whole piece is made of luggage tag barcodes and altered text characters in arial font; a series of pieces also by Dogula Coupland that reference facial recognition software by obscuring the faces from old Civil War portraits with vaguely technological-seeming geometric abstractions; a series of found photographs by Jon Rafman that the artist screenshot as the most strange and haunting images that he discovered while exploring random streets rendered into Google Maps’ Street View; and a series of paintings by Joel Holmberg that recreate classic paintings but playfully subvert them by making them appear to be the front pages of various websites instead of works of fine art.
Next up was a fun and funny interactive installation by Thomson and Craighead called More Songs of Innocence and Experience which plays with the familiarity we all now have with spam emails by turning famous examples of viral scams into hilariously corny easy listening songs and giving visitors the opportunity to sing along on a karaoke machine.
Next, we entered the section of the exhibition entitled Control Me which explores the more dystopian side of the internet and how it can be used for surveillance and collecting personal data. The first piece was an installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer called Please Empty Your Pockets which featured a conveyer belt that passes under a digital scanner. Visitors were encouraged to put items from their pockets onto the conveyer belt and once the items passed under the scanner they were photographed and projected onto the belt as ghostly lingering reminders of the people who came before.
After the installation, we came to another video piece this time by New York art-collective DIS. The video, entitled, A Good Crisis, used satirical PSAs to explore the 2008 Financial crisis and the way the aftermath and ensuing debt has affected millennials and Gen-Z-ers. Pictured below was a PSA featuring a White Walker from Game of Thrones dressed up for his job on Wall Street.
Next up was an immersive installation by Sophia Al-Maria called The Litany. The piece featured a surreal video narrated by Sam Neill depicting a young Arab woman trying to thwart the creation of a futuristic shopping mall. The video is projected above a sandpit filled with broken smartphones, tablets, and computers all glittering in the dark and endlessly streaming YouTube videos. At the end of the main video, the protagonist is destroyed and seems to become expelled to the sandpit herself joining in the haunting obsolescence.
The next section of the exhibit entitled, Sell Me Out, explored the intersection of consumerism and the internet, and opened with a slightly cheerier note than the last piece ended on. Things started out with Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s installation, New Eelam, which posits itself as a concept space for a (semi)fictional tech startup building an app that would decentralize housing and allow users to share living spaces across the world. The aesthetics of the installation are playfully satirical sending up the phony tech-utopia design principles of many real Silicon Valley companies (wall art by Artie Vierkant displaying Monsanto Soybeans is a subversive highlight), but the concept is deeply serious and rooted in the artist’s own experience as the son of Tamil refugees who fled civil war in Sri Lanka. Kulundran Thomas has actually built apps and piloted attempts to find alternatives to our capitalist notion of home ownership, favoring something more open, global, sustainable, and accessible. That mix of idealism underneath the cynicism adds a sweet hopefulness to the project, as if the artist knows that the odds of tech or art actually changing the world are slim but dang it maybe they still could.
Next up were a series of pieces by Simon Denny exploring the history and future of cryptocurrency. Denny created a series of retro-futurist assemblages that look like they could be stalls at an eccentric craft fair. These pieces focused a bit more on the loftier ideals of cryptocurrency such as democratizing wealth and taking it out of the hands of traditional banks and governments.
That being said, I much preferred Simon Denny’s other piece exploring the flipside of cryptocurrency (I will admit I am really not a fan), an update on the board game Risk that focuses on the ruthless (and often unregulated) competition between major players in the field and hints at some of the darker aspects of crypto such as the negative environmental consequences that powering blockchain technologies requires.
Lastly there was was another video installation. The piece by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin was entitled Range Week and featured two video pieces one of which was made up random footage one of the artists filmed in high school and one fictional piece in which young people compete to level up in a social caste system reminiscent of a fantastical version of how social media made real. Together the pieces explored how teenagerdom has changed and remained the same during the internet age, and the installation was curated to feel like it was being projected in a comfy suburban basement. I walked into the middle so I didn’t really absorb much of the film component but the seating was incredibly comfortable and nostalgic which was a really pleasant way to end the museum experience.
After the museum, Diantha took me to see a Chicago landmark, The John Hancock Center (though I guess it has been officially renamed 875 North Michigan Avenue which is less catchy, but apparently more accurate since the John Hancock Life Insurance Company hasn’t actually been in the building for several years). Walking in, I was impressed right away by the large glowing sculpture in the lobby, Lucent by Wolfgang Buttress. The piece is apparently an accurate 3D map of all the stars visible from the Northern Hemisphere and features 3,115 lightbulbs. Personally, my mind jumped to a dandelion being blown away than celestial bodies, but either way it was sort of mesmerizing.
Diantha and I took an elevator up to the 96th floor to The Signature Lounge for a cocktail and some absolutely stunning 360 degree views of the Windy City. I had a very tasty (if overpriced) Old Fashioned and Diantha got something fruity, but as good as the drinks were it was really the panorama that was the star of the show.
It was a little creepy but on one of the windows there was a spider doing its best to make a web and even if bugs give you the heebie jeebies you gotta admire the little guy’s chutzpah for getting 96 stories up.
After our drinks, Diantha came with me to the night’s open mic (my first in the city) which was in the backroom at an upscale pub called The Radler (sadly no longer in business). We got there a little early so I was able to enjoy one of their massive gourmet burgers and fries which was absolutely fantastic. I’m sad to see that it’s gone but one nice thing about the Midwest is that you’re never that far away from an excellent burger so I’m confident Chicago is doing just fine on that front.
The open mic proved to be a really fun introduction to Chicago comedy with a decent sized turn out and a friendly atmosphere. My favorite comic of the night was a guy named Louis Tuck who did a good bit about how he thinks it’s funny that the Church of Jesus Christ Scientist added being scientist to someone who can already do miracles. “The Dr. Mario of Jesuses, if you will”
Other highlights:
Liz Talkwell- My uncle was arrested for embezzling from his bowling league which is still somehow a white collar crime
Andre- I've been watching porn on mute, so now I think I have a thing for deaf women
St. James Jackson- White people are scared of Black people moving into white neighborhoods, like one day they’ll all wake up and the tennis courts are now basketball courts
Matt McClean- I have the most generic white guy face, I look like everyone from the JC penny's stock photos just hanging out with a golden retriever near a pile of leaves
Albert Autrey- When a woman at the bar flips her hair she's not trying to get with you, she just farted
Jess Martinez - I'm so independent that I hooked up with a guy and couldn't orgasm until the next day when he left
Sam Newkirk- I ran into a Rev. Jesse Jackson naked at a bathhouse (i don’t remember the punchline but that’s just incredible on its own.
Sam Cricket- I was an atheist until I did mushrooms. It's hard not to believe in the guy once you've met him.
My own sent went over pretty well too which was nice since it was Diantha’s first time seeing me perform. I wouldn’t want her to think that by housing me she was helping lower the average quality of the comedy in the city. All in all, it was a pretty packed day, but now that car troubles were behind me I really got to see how fun the city could be.
Favorite Random Sightings: an ad reading “Bodyman wanted”; a daycare called Tiny Giants; something called the Visceral Dance Company; and a bar called Spilt Milk
Regional Observation: I finally got to hear some real good Chicago accents, and it’s sort of mind-blowing how unique it is to essentially this one city.
Random Joke of the Day: One morning a man came into the church on crutches. He stopped in front of the holy water, put some on both legs, and then threw away his crutches.An altar boy witnessed the scene and then ran into the rectory to tell the priest what he'd just seen."Son, you've just witnessed a miracle!" the priest said. "Tell me where is this man now?""Flat on his ass over by the holy water!" the boy informed him.
Song of the Day:
From Wesley Willis (featured in the Intuit Center):
Also in the spirit of Outsider Art, here’s a weird animated video for a punk rock marching band from Chicago that my sister and I saw open for Primus:
Bonus Kool-Aid Man: